Posted
by
timothy
on Saturday June 14, 2014 @05:18AM
from the color-everyone-surprised dept.

jfruh (300774) writes HP's revelation that it's working on a radical new computing architecture that it's dubbed "The Machine" was met with excitement among tech observers this week, but one of HP's biggest competitors remains extremely unimpressed. John Swanson, the head of Dell's software business, said that "The notion that you can reach some magical state by rearchitecting an OS is laughable on the face of it." And Jai Memnon, Dell's research head, said that phase-change memory is the memory type in the pipeline mostly like to change the computing scene soon, not the memristors that HP is working on.

Dell is a reseller. They do not invest in any of the fundamental technologies like CPUs or Operating Systems. They have no design expertise in virtual machines like the JVM. They don't do chip design or fab. They have never been in any of these businesses.

HP has a long history of OS and CPU design, including their own computers with a proprietary architecture. Not all of their designs were successful, since they were co-designers of the Itanium with Intel. So HP has the exactly opposite corporate background the Dell.

Why would anyone pay attention to what a Dell talking head has to say?

What an executive from Dell, a company that is almost single-handedly stifling innovation in the computer industry by continuing to push enormous volumes of generic wintel garbage out onto the market to the exclusion of anything else/new/better/etc, has to say about innovation.

Do you truly, honestly, I mean...REALLY believe that Microsoft expends any time at all even thinking about ReactOS or WINE, let alone worrying about the.00000000000001 of a fraction of a portion of a negligible amount of a percent effect it might, MIGHT have on their bottom line?

If you read the original article about the technology, they have competing OS development teams. One of them is working on a new Open Source "Machine OS", another team is working on developing a modified version of Linux to take advantage of what the platform could potentially offer. As long as they are bothering to do that at all, I would say they know what they are doing and have a working answer to your question:

How exactly do you propose to design an OS for that, keeping the benefits of persistent data objects, while running applications working on serialized data on top of that?

Actually the financial math is all about amortizing those costs over the life of the product. So if Apple sold 4 iPhones they would have to allocate 500,000 man hours to each phone. The same with all those developments over time. Modern PCB technology is actually quite cool and no doubt took some serious development, but it has been amortized over a zillion PCBs. Apple would actually be paying those amortized costs as well in that any recent developments would still be including those costs when some company uses a recent development to supply them with a part.

But the key to amortizing a cost is that it eventually effectively hits zero. So the costs from Industrial Revolution developments were long ago reduced to zero. Although many times the amortization is a curve that is asymptotically zero; thus to be pedantic it is possible that some impossibly small portion of an iPhone is still paying off the development time spent 100's of years ago. From an economics point of view this is not actually impossible. There could be an area that specialized in say, fine machining, 300 years ago to a point where the same companies are in the same area still leaders in that field. Thus apple would have bought some of their manufacturing equipment from that company. Examples of this abound in Germany where there are plenty of companies that are from the Prussian Empire or before that are world leaders in their area of expertise; so good they survived Napoleon, WWI, and WWII. Krupp I believe is around 400 years old.